Electoral Register

Lord Roberts of Llandudno: To ask Her Majesty's Government where the pilot data-matching schemes to improve the completeness of the electoral register have taken place; and how many young people have been added to or subtracted from the electoral register as a result.
	To ask Her Majesty's Government with which organisations they are currently working as part of the pilot data-matching schemes to improve the completeness of the electoral register.
	To ask Her Majesty's Government on what basis the success of the pilot data-matching schemes to improve the completeness of the electoral register will be evaluated.

Lord Wallace of Saltaire: Further Cabinet Office pilot schemes, the third in recent sequence aimed at testing the usefulness of data matching for improving the completeness of the electoral register, are scheduled to take place in the first quarter of 2013. For the current set of pilot schemes the Cabinet Office is working with a number of data holding organisations against whose data the electoral registers of participating local authorities will be matched. Those organisations are:
	Cumbria County Council;
	Nottinghamshire County Council;
	the Welsh Ministers;
	the Department for Work and Pensions;
	Hampshire County Council;
	Lancashire County Council;
	the Department for Education;
	Student Loans Company Limited; and
	Royal Mail Group Limited.
	The local authorities participating in the data matching pilots are:
	Barrow in Furness;Ceredigion;Conwy;Coventry;City of Edinburgh, East Lothian, Midlothian and West Lothian (Lothian Valuation Joint Board);Greenwich;Harrow; Mansfield;Pembrokeshire;Peterborough;Powys;Renfrewshire, East Renfrewshire and Inverclyde (Renfrewshire Valuation Joint Board);Richmond upon Thames;Rushmoor;South Ribble;Southwark;Sunderland;Tower Hamlets;Wigan;Wolverhampton; andWrexham.
	Of those areas, Ceredigion, Coventry, Greenwich, Harrow, Pembrokeshire, Powys, Rushmoor, South Ribble, Sunderland, Tower Hamlets and Wolverhampton expect to run data-matching schemes aimed particularly at identifying students and/or young people who are about to attain the franchise.
	The results of the pilot schemes, including the numbers of young people added to or subtracted from the register, will not be known until the summer. The Electoral Commission will evaluate the schemes and will report by July 2013 to the registration officers concerned and to the Secretary of State. The report will be published. The Electoral Commission's responsibility in this respect is set out in Section 36 of the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009, namely to produce an evaluation of the pilot schemes which must assess:
	(e) How far the schemes achieved the purpose of assisting the local registration officer to meet his or her objective (ie that people entitled to be on their register are on it; people not entitled are not on it; and that information about people who are on the register is correct).(f) Whether (and if so, how much) people objected to the scheme;(g) How easy the scheme was to administer; and(h) Whether and how far the scheme resulted in time/cost savings.
	The commission's approach to the evaluation has been developed in the context of these statutory responsibilities.
	The Cabinet Office will evaluate the pilot schemes by examining the process of implementing data matching in differing local authorities, and by determining the impact of data matching on the electoral registers within the pilot areas.